TV And The Cloud People

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The other day, Tucker Carlson told someone that Trump trusts television more than he trusts the pollsters, when it comes to judging the public mood. Having spent years working in TV, Trump not only knows a lot about it, but he thinks the good TV people know more about public tastes than the political professionals. The political class, of course, roared in laughter. They think Trump is a rube, of course, but they are also sure they know more about the Dirt People than the Dirt People know about themselves.

This is another case where Trump’s common sense serves him well. The people who have long careers in television all have something in common. They make it their first priority to give the public what they want. Whatever political or personal agendas they have are secondary to putting on a good show. Unlike a pollster or political operator, the guy pitching TV shows has skin in the game. He has to be good at gauging public attitudes or else the show flops. The pollsters never suffer for being wrong.

The thing is though, the TV shows also tell us, the Dirt People, something about the people who rule over us. Hollywood is, after all, the class of people in American, whose duty it is to sing the praises of our rulers. It is also their job to sell the public on the official cultural agenda. Whatever fads or social issues are being pushed by our ruling class, will be praised in our TV shows and movies. It is why all of our action heroes are barren cat ladies now. It is why commercials are now full of race mixing.

On rare occasions, the people making this stuff reveal things about themselves and about the ruling class in general. Someone recommended the series House of Cards to me the other day, so I have been watching a few episodes a night over the last week. As far as this stuff goes, it is not as good as I would have expected. The chattering classes swooned over it when it came out, but it is not in the same league as a show like Breaking Bad. Still, it is not terrible and it is easy to see why people would enjoy it.

Usually, political dramas are terrible because the makers are more concerned with selling a political agenda. The shows are just thinly veiled political ads for the Democrat Party and various Progressive agenda items. That means lots of shows about abortion or sexually confused people being roughed up by the honky. House of Cards, at least so far, avoids that stuff and sticks to the intrigues of the main characters. People, especially women, like watching that sort of thing.

The fascinating thing is that is the politicians are portrayed as true masters of the universe. Everyone is portrayed as shrewd political operators. The main character would make Machiavelli blush. Usually, Hollywood portrays politicians as evil and stupid or sincere and naïve. House of Cards is a one long celebration of the genius and cleverness of the political class. It is not the issues they champion that makes them wonderful. It is their nature. They are simply better than us.

That is made clear in how the politicians in the show deal with Dirt People and the news media characters. The Dirt People are all dumb and helpless without government. The main character solicits a rib joint in the first season. Once this gets out, the rib joint gets famous, but the inherent defects in the proprietor and his Dirt People habits, lead him to failure, as he inevitably does stupid Dirt Man things, like try to help his son. The main character is forced to cut him loose and let him slide back into the muck.

The portrayal of the news media is the most interesting. On the other hand, they are universally portrayed as loathsome clingers, who serve only to drag down the Cloud People. The female reporters are whores, who will bang anyone for a story. The males are feckless and stupid. The one exception thus far in the show is the owner if a newspaper that is supposed to be the Washington Post. The owner of it is a Katherine Graham like Cloud Person, but her people are all loathsome Dirt People.

This is the most interesting part of the show thus far. I am into season two now. The main character has murdered one reporter, had one framed for a serious crime and scared another off to the hinterlands. He also has engineered the termination of a big shot editor at the Washington Post. None of this treated as a big deal. These news media types are so low on the food chain in the mind’s of the writers, which throwing one of them in front of a speeding train is no big deal. Even Trump does not hate the media that much

It is easy to overstate these things, but House of Cards is one rare example of the Hollywood people revealing things about themselves and their masters. It may be the result of Netflix producing it, rather than a Hollywood shop. For generations, the people making TV shows have stuck to the script when it comes to the class structure in America. Alternatively, this was deliberate. The makers wanted to flatter the political class by telling them things they tell themselves. The result is a window into the political class.

64 thoughts on “TV And The Cloud People”

  1. I gave up on network tv because of the commercials. So I wait to watch seasons of shows when they hit Netflix. So I was enjoying the Blacklist till I got to season 4. They have had episodes for Man Made Global Warming, Nuclear power is bad, corporations are evil and kill people for their inventions, the whole women make less than men shtick and a whole big helping of racism and how bad white people are. Once these shows that are supposed to be for fun, relaxing entertainment go full SJW I just have to turn them off.

    Another example of a show committing SJW suicide was Castle, enjoyed that show till they did an episode where the illegal alien syrians, along with the syrian government spies were the good guys being framed by disgruntled American military veterans in a terror attack on NYC. Never watched another episode after that.

    The the collapse of Hollywoods box office, the ratings plummet of the NFL, which translates in to lost money isn’t a clue, then they believe in their agenda first and are desperately trying to get the socialism train moving again after it’s derailment in the past couple of elections. I think the only thing keeping them above water is subsides and tax breaks/handouts from the very people they despise. Time to cut off all the free money and let them fail.

  2. If the masses like it, i stay away from it. At the beginning it lures you in, then goes full perversion and homosexual. My kids tell me The Walking Dead did it as well. I was intrigued by HOC but it went full bore sexual deviation over time. We become numb to this stuff and write it off as entertainment. Used to be ok watching crap with my spouse, we’re adults why not, then came to realization it was disrespectful to my spouse to sit and watch that garbage. Then it weasels its way into your senses. Cut the cord and be selective in what you pour into your mind.

  4. Cold Fury is gone. You get a message that says “cold fury.com has expired. If you know the owner of this domain, please let them know.” I know you have a link to him, Z.

  7. The other thing Trump knows about television is how to command its attention, and by association, how to command an audience. Yes, the people who produce it have to have the pulse of the public mood. But their great weakness is that they are a moth to a flame on certain topics. Trump has exploited this masterfully.

    Much of what passes for television today is simply political indoctrination. I turned on a college football game last weekend, only to be greeted by a 2 1/2 minutes (TWO AND A HALF MINUTES) long re-education seminar about different people kissing each other on the jumbotron. A few normals to draw you in, then 2 minutes of gays, mixed races, more gays, a normal, more gays, various combinations of white/black/Asian/etc.. back to gays again. It went on, and on, and on, and on, and on.

    I wanted to see where all this was going, but after about 2 minutes I just yelled, “J.H.C. motherf**kers, we get it!” My wife – who despises college football – just laughed because she had just got done telling me how much she dislikes college football, but I changed the channel anyway. I guess I had it coming.

    Odds of me watching a college football game the rest of this season? About zero.

    • They don’t even try to hide the social engineering efforts any more! Off the rails. I’m kinda glad because maybe force-feeding us this stuff will bring things to a head. Enough.

      • They’re workin’ overtime on my kids who buy into all this, “Who am I to say who somebody can or can’t love,” garbage. I remind them a lot that is has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with defining deviancy down…making the abnormal appear normal, and the normal to appear abnormal. That’s how you take a system down.

        • Tell your boys flat out what it is that queer men do. Describe the pain and the feces and the enemas. Show them the statistics on the queer community at the CDC web site. Emphasize that sexual deviancy is not a civil right and has nothing to do with ‘love.’

          Go on the offensive, or lose them.

          • One of the reasons for the breakdown of sexual self-restraint was the invention of penicillin, widely used during WWII in order to successfully treat venereal disease. For the first time in history, picking up VD was no big deal because it could be successfully treated. Other antibiotics were invented after the War. Given the pervasive promiscuity and general hedonism in the gay community, they would have Darwinized themselves a century ago. The wages of sin are death and all that. Now they can saved from the consequences of their self-indulgence.

  8. I tried watching HOC for a while because my wife was into it. I gave up after a few episodes because I decided I hate politicians. I don’t think they’re nearly as smart as this show portrays them to be.

  9. Robin Wright was just barely pretty enough to pull off Buttercup 30 years ago. Now trying to depict her as an object of widespread sexual desire is just a bad joke.

  11. TV is utopia on tap for progressives. The industry is compensated for being a propaganda mill with generous tax breaks compliments of Obama. They’ve jumped the shark with feminism, so expect a downward trajectory.

  12. These show creators have a dilemma.

    As Jews — we all know that they are all Jews, right? Hollywood is run by Jews. They even admit it. — They deperately want to show that straight white men are evil Nazis who must be overthrown. But leading with that openly doesn’t attract many viewers.

    So they put out the BAIT… starting out a series showing straight white men something that excites them — The functional white world of Mad Men, the honor & swordfighting of Game of Thrones, the alpha male machiavelianism of House of Cards… then they make the SWITCH.

    The next thing you know, Don Draper is championing his female underlings career, Hillary Targaryan is roasting the patriarchs of Westeros & President Underwood is biting the Lincoln Bedroom pillows.

    It’s obvious, logical & predictable. Also incredibly dangerous to our society. Politics is downstream from culture, and our culture is being created by a tribe that hates our guts & wants us to vanish.

    News Flash: If we want to survive, eventually we are going to have to do more than harrumph about it. Not necessarily today. But today we can at least agree that just harrumphing about it isn’t enough.

    • I would recommend three series–Justified, The Wire, and Firefly. They are all good storytelling, and none of them bait and switch.

  14. Yeah, it turned to shit at some point. Not sure exactly when, maybe when it turned out that Spacey’s character was bi? Or an actual murderer? I dunno. It just got stupid.

    So I quit.

  15. House of Cards was big in the DC-NY corridor. Politicians like to think they are masters of the universe. In reality, the current political structure arms the politicians with powers which they don’t deserve, and have not historically been entitled to, under our system of government. Most of them are also intellectually unfit for the role (Al Franken or Maxine Waters, really?). But they flatter themselves thinking they are some version of Frank Underwood. The show is nothing more than a DC masturbatory fantasy.

  16. I enjoyed your “pubic” for “public” tastes typo in paragraph one, first because it’s one I’ve made myself, second because public tastes very often are pubic tastes.

    • I’ve often made that one on purpose, for yuks, but this time it was just a mistake. Funny still, but a mistake.

  17. Try the original British version. Francis Urquhart has style and flash, very fun to root for and root against at the same time. Frank and Claire Underwood are just cold fishes. Shows are enjoyable when you have someone to root for (or at least root against). I found I couldn’t care less about any of the characters in the US version.

    The power of the US version appears to be the “look at this” virtual car crash that is Washington politics, as depicted in the show. Donald Trump has already done Frank Underwood ten times better, and with real style, not the Orson Wellsian low camera angles, big lingering entrances, and shadowy backgrounds of the TV production.

  20. “it is not terrible and it is easy to see why people would enjoy it.”

    TV has become so full of flat-out agitprop, that anything that isn’t actually an ode to Comrade Stalin, or doesn’t have a screenplay written by Tiny Duck, looks pretty good by comparison. And of course, anything that displays journalists in their true light is to be encouraged…

  21. Slightly OT, but followig the theme here. I just finished watching “Ozark.” One of the main characters, the FBI agent, isn’t only gay, he’s a gay who takes what he wants. One scene depicts rough gay hardcore. Absolutely unnecessary filler. The narritve is getting that bold.

    • It’s triumphalism. They are rubbing our noses in the fact that they won and are now in charge of everything. There’s no other way to look at it.

        • I liked Ozark a lot, and that puts it in a class of maybe four or five shows out there. My daughter is in Hollywood and I talked the show over with her. She liked it, I loved it. All the women she knows liked it, all the men loved it, yet it is precisely the several female characters who are strikingly different and who evolve most interestingly. She cannot explain the preference by sex through all that and it bugs her. I didn’t object to the queer scenes. The gay are presented generally in an unflattering and other worldly light, perhaps even more so than other characters but not less.

      • Its in everything. I watched a bit of the first season of Mr. Robot and was treated to an entirely unnecessary BDSM scene with a pregnant woman which put a quick end to my watching the show

        As for Ozark, I wouldn’t watch anything Hollywood or media put out about that part of the country anyway that not only don’t understand it but actively hate it .

        Of course in the end those fools are only hurting themselves ,

        People are watching a lot less TV and as soon as the ad purchasers realize that TV ads are waste of time and money much as You Tube ads are, profits will drop further

        Right now its all running on wishful thinking , inertia and FUD and it will end

        Come to think of it, if they keep pushing things and it comes to a violent conclusion, they’ll probably end up on a noose anyway and no one will miss them.

    • Ew. I find that so distateful. I stopped watching Penny Dreadful after the completely out-of-the-blue gay sex scene between Dorian Grey and the Cowboy/Werewolf.

    • That is why I don’t watch any new TV at all. I actually don’t want to watch straight people having real or pretend sex but I don’t find it disgusting like I do gay people. And they are totally thrown in our face now. Say no to gay porn. And that means saying no to new TV I’m afraid

      • I quit all TV and movies in 1991. I was driven off the cliff when I realized my local Ns didn’t act anything like the TV Ns. I alway suspected something was amiss.
        /sarc.

    • So sick of all the messaging in so many tv shows, tv ads, movies! White women with black men, all kinds of degenerate gay stuff we’re supposed to appreciate, harpy feminists being sluts and jerks to men, normalized violence, etc. Yuck. Getting harder to find anything decent to watch in spite of hundreds of options.

  22. What Trump has is not the simple common sense that many of us are born with, but a highly developed intellectus type of mind. He observes and responds, rather than analyzes and calculates. Think of it like a chess master who sees patterns rather than engages in strategy analysis, or a Wayne Gretsky who knows where the puck will be after contact with three other players.

    This is something dirt people may not be aware of being able to see explicitly, but always seem to appreciate. It is because it is a way of seeing the world that they have in common.

    You could look at this as an inherited genetic/evolutionary trait, or as an aspect of spirituality. It is described by old theologians as how the angels view things.

    Survival in a jungle, on a savannah, in mountains, or deciduous forests does not require an ability to calculate needs, but a sense of them and how to meet them. In other words, the ability to analyse and calculate is not essential to survival and is a late development, almost window dressing evolutionarily speaking. But it has been made a fetish of, and those who rely less so on it are mocked by those who have less of the more primitive skill to the point that they have lost it.

    This is an aspect of the dirt/cloud divide.

    • Another instance to think on: consider how many aspects are covered in the statement “this much” vs “how many”.

    • To loop it back to Trump and TV, what you are saying, and it is worth pointing out, is that Trump is deft at measuring culture through the first or second derivative calculation. TV is a useful tool for him in that exercise. It is useful because it reveals the mindset and motivations of the people who create it, who in turn are trying to respond to the cultural signals that they detect. Trump is akin to the hunter or tracker who not only identifies the tracks and signs of his prey having passed through, but also has the skills to assemble the clues into a timetable and a framework of the circumstances and condition of his prey.

      • No. The point is that he doesn’t have to calculate. Some kind of subconscious calculus may be going on, but he doesn’t have to make hardly any effort to make it happen.

        • Agreed, it obviously just works for him, what appear to be “snap” judgements and conclusions usually turn out to be very prescient.

  23. Superhuman politicians conquering all before them eh? Reminds me of the male journalist who in real life was a fat loser who wrote ‘The girl with a dragon tattoo’ and made the male all-conquering hero who could bed any chick he wanted a journalist.

  24. The part about power-politicians killing off their enemies without hesitation or inhibition is especially revealing and accurate. Most folks reflexively believe that this sort of thing is just conspiratorial myth and then simply dismiss such claims out-of-hand because to believe otherwise makes them complicit in a degenerate culture that allows it to continue. The latter phenomenon is why politicians will never give up the tactic. In democracy, the deaths are generally few and far between; but tyranny escalates to genocide pretty easily.

  25. Hilarious. I’ve met a few politicians in my time; like the journalists I’ve met, they’re vapid airheads who couldn’t outwit a cheeseburger (the few that seem to have anything on the ball, like Paul Ryan, also seem like the kind of kids who “win” junior high “debates” with the word “technically:” “technically, it was the bullet that killed Mr. Smith, not my client”). One of these days, I’d love to hear a Liberal explain how winning an election — just a popularity contest for the lowest common denominator, they assure us, when their guy is losing — somehow turns one into a 4D chess master.

    • I worked on the Bob Dole campaign, after working on the Gingrich gubernatorial campaign, as a youngster. Couldn’t get back to redneck hickville and away from these people, fast enough.

  26. Also (and I apologise for clogging up your comments section) House of Cards was originally based on an English series about the British government. So the initial direction and honesty might be inherited from that.

  27. > this show is clearly written by and aimed at women

    Like just about everything these days.[1] Which is why I never heard of this TV show, don’t go to church, and keep my boys away from anarchic schoolmarms,[2] via home schooling.
    __________
    [1] As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths. (Isaiah 3:12)

    [2] “Behavioral research has demonstrated that males have a higher capability of regulating their own and others’ emotions than females.” journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0097071

  28. Someone recommended the series House of Cards to me the other day, so I have been watching a few episodes a night over the last week.

    Oh dear Lord. It starts well, but then takes a decidedly feminist turn around Season 3. I wrote about this here, if you don’t mind spoilers. I didn’t even bother with Season 5.

    • It’s funny, but I’m into season two and you can see it is about to go full girlpower! at any moment. The number of interesting male characters has already dwindled to a few.

      • One can find the English original series the American one is based upon.

        Far more vile and wicked are the main characters

        • I understand House of Cards 2.0 is made by the same British team who made House of Cards 1.0, but the British version is far better, IMO. The actor who played the nasty and Politically Incorrect Francis Urquhart was unhappy because the British viewing audience loved the character.

      • Similarly, I bailed after Season 4. Like many TV series in 2015 and 2016, it’s obvious that they told the writers to turn the scripts into brazen I’m With Her commercials. Credibility and quality suffered an expected decline.

        I think House of Cards is probably doomed as a show now, simply because there is no way that a show based on portraying Washington as a five-dimensional chess board of intrigue can survive daily evidence to the contrary.

      • The show is a remake of a BBC original (which is also on Netflix). Season 1 is great because they took the source material and improved on it. Thing is the BBC show didn’t try to maintain a continuous storyline, each season was a stand alone plot. So by the time season 3 of the Netflix House of Cards comes around the writers are having to do all the creative work themselves. If you’re enjoying it so far keep going, but better advice than “watch House of Cards” would probably have been “watch season 1 of House of Cards.” (Second bit is also true of the BBC series)

      • If you haven’t already, watch the original British version that was on Masterpiece a long time ago. Superior in every way. Tim is correct about the series going to hell. They ran out of ideas. Fell into lazy soap opera slop. Best regards.

    • the reaction of most the women I deal with was that the show got worse (to the point of unwatchable) the more the wife became the storyline.

      they didn’t connect with the ultra ambitious, cold, conniving wife, and lost respect for the husband once it was clear that for all his power and ruthlessness in office, he was an ass pirating cuckold in the home.

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